Old stomping grounds
Some of the landmarks of Stephen Harper’s early life in Toronto:
332 Bessborough Dr., Leaside
Stephen Harper spent his first 12 years in a red-brick, two-storey house with a bay window and small fireplace in the living room and a fenced backyard. He liked to say he “grew up in a small town in Toronto.” Some of his fondest memories are of walking to the old Leaside station with his father to watch trains come and go. In 1971, Joe Harper sold the Bessborough house for $39,500 — “probably not the wisest financial transaction they ever made,” Harper joked a few years ago about his parents, given that the property is probably now worth 30 times that much.
Leaside Memorial Community Gardens
In an era when the 1972 Canada-Soviet Summit Series made the normally hockeycrazy nation more rabid than ever, Harper found his patch of ice at Leaside Arena, where he probably got his skates sharpened by Frank Mahovlich’s father. He played — “very poorly,” he said — for the Leaside Lions, a blond, gangly left-hand shot. A photo from his playing days was hung on the wall after he became PM. “It wasn’t there at the time I played, believe me,” he said. (Harper also assured Leaside residents that he had paid for the framing himself and hadn’t used taxpayers’ money.) More recently, Harper donated $1,000 to the arena’s construction of a second ice pad.
57 Princess Anne Cres., Etobicoke
From Leaside, the Harpers moved across town to Etobicoke in 1971 to a ranch bungalow with big picture window, three fireplaces, a large lawn and two-car garage. It is the setting for Harper’s adolescence and coming of age, and the reason he is referred to as Canada’s first suburban prime minister.
John G. Althouse Middle School
Like so many Canadians of a certain age, Stephen Harper remembers exactly where he was on the afternoon of Sept. 28, 1972. Harper watched the final game of the Canada-Soviet Summit Series on TV in his school gymnasium, rising along with the nation when, as Foster Hewitt put it, “Henderson has scored for Canada!” to win the game and the series. “Teachers had long ago given up trying to teach us during these games,” he recalled. “We can all remember Paul Henderson’s goal. Who could forget it?” The passion for hockey endured, resulting in Harper’s 2013 book on hockey history — the first book, it’s thought, by a sitting prime minister — called A Great Game.
Richview Collegiate Institute
In high school, Stephen Harper was an academic star and the bespectacled, plaid- bell-bottom-wearing ace of the school’s
Reach for the Top team. (Richview lost to Vincent Massey Collegiate 445-160 — half of those points produced by Harper.) Still, former classmates do not recall him as an opinion leader. In fact, had Harper not gone on to become prime minister, it’s a reasonable guess that, come the school’s 50th anniversary — which he attended in 2008 — few of his former classmates would have had much more than a foggy memory of the gawky brainiac. At that reunion, the Richview Saint who became PM got to live every nerd’s dream. “I guess you’re not wondering what happened to me after high school,” he said.